Comment Policy

I have been receiving a large number of supportive comments from Anonymous commenters, which makes me want to talk a bit about my comments policy. I find Captcha's annoying, so I don't use them on my blog. However, this means that I get quite a few spam comments, so I rely on Blogger's spam filter to keep them off my posts so I don't need to delete the 10-20 spam comments I get a week.

Unfortunately, if you comment anonymously Blogger is a lot more likely to consider your comment spam. When I notice a nice comment not encouraging me to buy something or use some product that is put into the spam folder, I take it out, but I apologize for however long it spends languishing in there. Now, a sad, cynical part of me wonders if some crazy hacker wanting to boost bloggers' self-esteems has written a "SpamBot" to leave generic encouraging comments on blogs. I am willing to risk posting such comments, and I refer you to this relevant xkcd comic.

Michigan Proposition 6 2012

Proposition 6 requires voters to approve any new bridge from the US to Canada. As far as I can tell, it is a laughable attempt by the owner of the current bridge from Detroit to Canada to maintain his monopoly. Of course, I lean toward NO on Proposition 6.

In a similar vein to my objection to Proposition 5, we elect representatives for a reason. If we want to move away from a representative democracy and try to make some form of direct democracy work, I am all for that! However, I do not think international bridge building has any reason to be the cornerstone on which we create this new form of government. If there were something wrong with the plans to build this new bridge specifically, I would be open to hearing them. But to require *all* future bridge building between Michigan and Canada to be put to popular vote, I'm not sure whether that is "solving" a problem that doesn't exist or actively going out and creating a problem.

So, I recommend NO on Proposition 6.

Searching for the Stretch

The instructor at Wednesday's lesson said that when he dances Lindy Hop he is always looking for the stretch, or it is all about the stretch, or something to that effect. I really liked that statement, because it works on multiple levels. Purely pragmatically, I want to get better at Lindy Hop so I should be paying attention to getting good stretch where it ought to be. More metaphorically, the stretch is how dancers communicate, so this might be interpreted as looking for communication. I think this interpretation is quite interesting, as well as heartwarming, because stretching is achieved by both parties settling away from one another; so communication  is mutual and is obtained by a slight withdrawal.

Anyway, I thought that phrase was awesome, so I made a post with that as the title. I kind of wanted to make a blog about dancing and entitle it that, but I have enough trouble keeping up with this blog, and I'm not sure that I have enough to say about dancing... we'll see. Without further ado, what your dance style says about your personality:

East Coast: Fun loving and silly. Like, really really silly. So silly that it becomes problematic if people take you entirely seriously. I probably belong to this category, so keep that in mind when deciding how seriously to take this list.

Lindy Hop: Fun loving and silly... but a bit of an elitist.

West Coast: Thinks being serious and somber is sexy. Probably watched too many vampire movies as a child.

Charleston: Just wants to groove with it, it's no big thing. Happy to dance with someone or alone, because dancing is awesome. Every day I'm just shufflin'. (Note: link is not to Party Rock Anthem, I like to think that I am classier than that, even though there is Charlestoning in the music video.)

Collegiate Shag: Probably has some sort of drug issue, no one has that kind of energy naturally.

Balboa: Wants to grope their partner.

Blues: Wants to grope their partner whilst also grinding on them.

Salsa: Flashy and smooth. This is the dance of trumpet players.

Bachata: Wants to grope their partner whilst also shaking their hips like mad.

Meringue: Just wants to shake their hips like mad, preferably while doing something incredibly silly and grinning like its no big thing.

Tango: Thinks being serious and angry is sexy. Probably a closet emo.

Foxtrot: Likes big band music, but is too serious to deign to Lindy Hop. Alternatively they are on their second set of knees after wearing the first out bouncing.

Waltz: Likes music in 3/4, and this is the only thing they can dance to that.

Dances too much to feel affiliation with one specific genre: Probably is awesome!

I know there are other forms of dancing, a lot of other forms of dancing, but I am restricting myself to social dances. Even so, I missed a lot of styles, but I just don't know anyone I would consider a Rumba-er, or a Samba-er, etc. If you are offended, I am sorry, I tried to keep it positive (nothing inherently wrong with wanting to grope your partner... I guess) and silly. Except Tango-ers, I am not sorry if I offended you one bit, you know you like it you angsty blighters.

Too Busy to Write More Than Two Paragraphs

I couldn't decide whether to do a post about the visit so far now, or do one tomorrow when more of the visit has happened. However, I think I am tired and want to be awake to hang out with friends tomorrow, so I'm not going to do much today. So, rather than spend time writing worthwhile things instead of sleeping today, I'm going to mention some things I want to write about soon.

 I'll do a little year wrap up tomorrow or the first of January. I'll also mention a bit about MoBloYoFoMo when it is over, so these two things might be one post. Most importantly in that post, we'll try to hammer out where to go from here. And I want to mention a bit about Epic New Year Party Episode III. Of course, there were the rest of the Identity posts that I wanted to get to... eventually.

MoBloYoFoMo Ground Rules

Well, here it is. A month where I'm supposed to put up a new blog post each day... why did I choose a month with so many days again? Since I will be producing prose at such a prodigious rate, I cannot guarantee, in fact I don't even suspect, that what I write will be up to what I consider to be my normal standard of interestingness and thought-provoketivity. Take this post for example.

In fact, I still have a little over a week left in the semester, so for that time I shall be scrambling to post something each day. However, I promise not to fall back to updates about my life too often; I get bored writing those and I can only imagine how bored you must be reading them. One of my favorite things about this blog is how much enjoyment I get out of going back and re-reading things I have posted. When I was searching for my favorite posts to list in my 100th post I saw a lot of interesting things that I had forgotten that I'd written. Of course, my absolute favorite thing about this blog is the discussions that will occasionally pop up in the comments, but looking back and realizing how clever I am is up there.

After school gets out I should have a bit more time to put into my posts. There are various topics that I have wanted to talk about, but have yet to find the time and or motivation to put together the polished post that I think they deserve. Maybe I'll crack open my cache of blog ideas and get some use out of that. Then I head out for adventure! Or, maybe just on vacation to visit family and friends. Either way, I'll be busier, so maybe back to the inane, "this is what I am doing," type posts, but at least they will be slightly more interesting.

I did not write up a bunch of posts so I have one on standby in case I get too busy to write one on a given day, both because this doesn't seem in the spirit of NaNoWriMo, and because it seems ridiculous for me to stop publishing in my blog to save up for a plan that is supposed to get me to publish in my blog more. However, now that December has begun I reserve the right to write posts ahead of time and publishing them as needed to keep on schedule. Doing something that prepared doesn't really sound like something I would do, but stranger things have happened. I'll see you tomorrow!

A Note on Content

As I mentioned, I have many browser tabs open, storing things about which I would like to talk. However, I am not going to do that today. "Why?" you might ask. Because responding to things in a meaningful way takes a lot more time, mental energy, and effort that just making up a post whole cloth, and I am still fairly worn out.

There is the obvious reason, posts in which I respond to other things, or even develop my own idea seriously, tend to be longer, and thus take more time. They need to introduce whatever it is I am referring to, in a way so that the people who don't love hyperlinking around the Internet discovering new, interesting, and awesome things will have an idea what I am talking about without reading the source link.

It also is a more arduous process because I feel the need to give weighty consideration to what I say. In this post, after I decided what I wanted to say and why/how I would say it, I basically am just writing as it comes to me. But if I am developing an idea I think is important/interesting, or, to put it another way, about which I would really like some discussion and constructive feedback, I feel that I should take the time to structure my thought in an interesting, appealing, and accessible manner, which takes time.

Additionally, if I am responding to something thought provoking, I feel the pressure to make my response a worthy one. If I don't add meaningful thought to the discussion, then I might as well have just posted the link and let you simply read it for yourself. So, while response posts are quite interesting to write, as you might guess from the number of them I do, and pleasant in that I don't need to worry about coming up with something to talk about, they do require a lot of energy.

I don't have a lot of energy, so you got this today ;)

Metaphorically Speaking

I think that metaphors, and their cousins similes, are incredibly useful tools, both for the educator and the artist, so I thought I'd spend a post explaining why I admire them so much. If all goes well, this will set the stage, metaphorically, for my next post tomorrow.

As I see it, the purpose of every metaphor is to get someone, perhaps just yourself, to look at something differently by comparing it to a similar object/process. The reason for doing this falls into two broad categories. It may have a didactic purpose, as when someone uses a metaphor to explain a foreign concept by appealing to a familiar one. For example, I often attempt to explain why proofs are important in mathematics by noting that the ability to perform a calculation is like being able to drive a car, but a mathematician is like a mechanic in that she or he should understand what is going on underneath the hood. The other reason is exploratory, the metaphor brings to light a new way of understanding the process in question, this is the reason that interests me most.

Metaphors are used in this sense by the artists. The poet who calls a sunrise a bird taking flight, or life a path through the woods, does not do so in order to explain the phenomenon at hand. Rather, he or she intends that we discover something new about the phenomenon by viewing it in a new light. This same notion can be used in an academic setting. Upon establishing a baseline metaphor between object of interest A and object of explanation B based on a given list of similarities, one can ask what properties of B that are not on the list have, in some sense, a corresponding property in A, in doing so, one often has new ideas about the nature of A. This is why I habitually try to extend most every metaphor to the point that it breaks down, just to see if anything interesting happens.

The last thing that I want to mention is that models, be they physical or theoretical, or both, are an important example of a metaphor. Whether you are trying to simulate something in a smaller, controlled environment or with mathematical principles, you are replacing the actual thing with a representation of it, which is a form of metaphor.

Moral Entropy

"Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night."

-Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night, Dylan Thomas

We sacrificed our gods, our community, even our families on the altar of rationality, and what have we earned through our devotion? A universe where we know so many reasons, yet have lost our meanings.

Over 200 years ago the philosopher David Hume noted that what is and what ought be have no obvious logical connection. In doing so he launched the pyre ship for Western Civilization. Although moral philosophers have attempted to mine ever deeper into the crevasses of human experience, veins of ethics are running dry all about us. This is the legitimization problem into which modern governments, and all mass-scale projects born of the age of reason, find themselves inexorably drawn.

The modern state pervades our life to an unprecedented level. We are surveilled, enculturated, and controlled through a multitude of wide-reaching governmental programs. Programs, such as public education, in which I hold heartfelt and deep respect, but programs without rational grounding. Rationality has cast down the universal morals, toppling them as axiomatic dogmas without grounding in the type of scientific evidence generally held to be necessary to claim a model holds impartial truth. In their place, we have enshrined common goals of public goals, seeking to anchor our failing ethic to telos, or goals/purposes.

The problem with this is twofold. Pragmatically, it is certainly open to argument how effective these programs are at their stated goals. With widespread dissent as to what the public good is, and how schools, welfare, market regulation, and government itself ought promote it, placing an ethic upon a notion of public goals seems to doom it to be a meager ethic. Small in scope, hard fought between different factions, an ethic of the nasty, brutish, and short sighted.

More fundamentally, one runs against the impenetrable bedrock of axiomatic assumption. Aside from our say so, what makes public good, good? To rephrase the question, if I want to be a misanthrope, why ought I not be? If I want to take my plastic grocery bags out an use them to asphyxiate horned owls, why ought I not, is it not, "[our] planet to kill"? (The quote comes from the comment thread on a blog post of my sister's)

This is another reason I have a deep distrust for large scale entities, be they governmental, economic, political, or activist. I do not believe we have sufficient normative energy, morality, left to fuel these endeavors harmoniously, perhaps we never did. If power corrupts, why do we continue to raise power structures that loom ever higher is our world like modern towers of Babel constructed from wealth, technology, and organization of people on unprecedented scales. At the same time our system of accountability crumbles to unlamented dust. If the divine right to rule spawned abuses, at least it provided a framework in which the ruler was to be held accountable. We are constructing a world where the rulers have no right to rule, only the naked fact that indeed they are ABLE to rule. A world where corporations are REQUIRED by law to circumvent laws if the expected cost of paying off the fine is less than that of coming into accordance with existing regulations. In short, a world where the systems of power are hardly held in check by a dysfunctional and dying morality.

I do not advocate a regression to the systems of morality which previously existed. Having heard the siren call of reason we can hardly stop up our ears and attempt to mandate a shared public morality through government religion, at least not if we wish to be taken seriously. The Pandora's box which we have opened contains too many blessings, medicine, technology, a glimpse at the terrifying beauty shining from a universe laid bare before the merciless manipulations of modern science, I do not believe that we could shut it, even if the majority could be convinced that it is necessary.

Rather, I urge us to turn toward the concrete, to the all encompassing web of human interrelations in which we find yourselves enmeshed. As I always have, I suggest that all notions of worldly value left for us to cling to in solidarity is the value of our fellow human flotsam in the maelstrom of modernity. Unfortunately, this moral too falls afoul of the axiomatic criterion. I can tell you why I believe shared humanity is important, why I feel it is the only thing of worth in the world, but I cannot logically derive why it should be important to you. Thus, in the end, all we are left is the moral darkness closing in around, an entropic demise of the ethical world long before the speculated mirror event in the physical realm. But if all is to be overcome by tides of chaos, is it not best that we go into the end, or whatever new beginning this may be, secure in the company of each other?

"Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

We're Planning a Party!

As post 100 continues to creep closer, I have been wondering what I want to do with these last few posts leading up to it and with my 100th post. In my next couple of posts I want to write up some ideas I have had for a while. While my blog idea list continues to expand more than it shrinks, I would like to put out the third and final (planned) post in my Kantian respect and in my philosophy of pop music series.

That will take me up to post one hundred. As for that post, while I have some ideas, I also would like to know if you have any thoughts. It is clear to me that the main reason I have stuck with it so long, albeit erratically, is the pleasure I get from reading your responses, especially those that present a new perspective from which to view the situation, or expand on a point I may have overlooked.

It is not often that someone as inherently flighty as I am puts this much effort into a personal hobby; there is an embarrassingly bad set of webcomics to attest to that, and even my math blog has been lacking in updates lately. That I made it this far is because this isn't just a personal hobby to me, this is a shared undertaking. So, it only makes sense that I at least invite you to help plan my 100th post, since you have already helped me get to a place that I can talk about writing it.

I check my pageview stats slightly obsessively, because it is nice to know that what I write is being read. However, in addition to corrupted data from reporting computerized accesses, by SpamBots and the like, pageviews cannot tell me how much people are thinking about a post. To gauge that I basically rely on comments. Nothing heartens me more than to see commenters engaging in discussions independent of my participation in the comment thread.

If you have a thought regarding the 100th post, please feel free to leave it. And, as always, feel free to respond if you feel the urge! I'm sure I'll say it again in a couple of days, but it bears repeating, thank you for getting me this far!

Administrivia

A couple of quick notes. I remain firmly committed to keeping my updates to the at most one per day rule. Since I would like it if people read and thought about every one of them, it seems that one a day may actually be too fast a tempo. However, you may notice I make exceptions, this happens when I post something I don't particularly care if people think about, although I still like being read ;). These administrative posts are one example, nothing much deep happening here. Another was the poem yesterday, I like it and all, but, in my opinion, it really isn't deep thought provoking. So, that's just a heads up as to where I'm at in regards to update schedule.

Like I said, I like to believe that I am being read. The main way I achieve that is through your feed back. Sure, when I have time off I obsessively stalk the stats page, gazing longingly at the page view count, but since my cynical side assumes most of those are bots or other automatic processes sizing up my turf, I don't put a ton of stock in it. So, if you are not commenting out of some mistaken belief that what you have to say is not relevant or worthwhile, please feel free to comment, I love comments. If you don't want to take the time, please do not feel obligated too! But, if there is something you feel like saying but you aren't sure, as long as it is polite (and I don't mean you have to agree with me, in fact, I kind of prefer when people don't), go ahead and post it.

On a related note, I love feed back where ever it comes from, I especially like it when it is on the post itself. The reason for this is that, ideally, other people will respond not only to my post, but to the comments already on it, and we can get a discussion going, and discussions are some of my favorite things in the whole world; deep conversations and dancing, my two favorite activities. Of course, I understand that in the past there have been issues with posting comments for some reason, or maybe you just don't feel comfortable doing so, or just don't want to. This is, of course, fine. If you want to post a comment, but find yourself unable to, if you get it to me in another way and tell me that you want it posted, I will post it under your first name, or whatever moniker you prefer.

Finally, although I'm whittling down my backlog of blog topics, I still have a selection available. So, I was going to see if people have any preference which they see first. However, I will describe them in my own vague style, where a post about value, commercialization, and Monsanto is actually about a call to my Grandma. So, the choices you have are my third post on music videos about the song Dead and Gone, my third post on Kant's categorical imperative about homeless people, a post about football, or a post about public transit. I may do a post about Facebook next, because it is timely (I was going to do it tonight, but this is actually turning into a substantial post, so probably tomorrow), but, if people express a preference, it will be the first of the four options that I get to. That should be enough for today, have a good night!

Capcha

I am irritated every time I have to enter a Captcha code to comment on a blog. After all, I know that I am human! Also, I sometimes forget to do the Captcha then don't comment. This is why my blog, currently, does not require a Captcha.

However, I do get a fair amount of SpamBot generated commenting. This isn't something I mind much, Blogger is fairly good about recognizing it and quarantining it, so I don't even need to delete it. I am disappointed to see an E-mail about a comment, then realize there is nothing personal and interesting in the comment. Since I encourage people to subscribe to the comment thread for posts that they comment on, it occurs to me that you too might suffer disappointment when disingenious comments are made.

So, I am opening it up to your input, what do you think about Captcha requirements to post on the blog? If people make a good argument for them, I'll implement them. After all, it isn't as though I'd need to verify my own comments, I think...

My Forgetful Mind

Almost went to bed, then I remembered I owe you all an update on my life. Since I am sleepy this shall be short. Fortunately, not much particularly interesting happened in the past week. Classes, both as a student and teacher, progress apace. I am trying to bring the energy to the subject Frank, but I think I only managed to come off as a manic scatterbrain today. Oh well, there is always tomorrow, literally. You can tell college level educators are spoiled by how disappointing/draining it is to teach two days in a row. Of course, this summer I taught 2 hours a day 4 days a week, so this shouldn't be too hard.

The only unusual occurrence this past week was the Math Department Grad Prom. As you might imagine, it involved a bunch of math grads, and some of our friends, getting together and acting like high schoolers for a couple of hours. There was some dancing (not the real kind for the most part, I said high school remember). Getting people on the floor wasn't as difficult as in high school, so I guess people do become more self confident as they get older. I would sum the event up as somewhat fun and very tiring.

Idiocracy Redux

Savoring my last days of freedom before spring term commenced, I found myself watching Idiocracy for the first time late Saturday night, or rather, early Sunday morning. I found it to be a humorous, if somewhat grim, movie, slightly reminiscent of Brazil.

Fast forward to twenty minutes ago. I was reading through a comment pile loosely tied to the Snoop Dog/Bill O'Reilly fiasco here. Someone made a comment likening Snoop Dog's comments to the script of Idiocracy, which I read, thought about for two second, and then passed over. Later in the comment pile I had the sudden horrifying revelation that it is not uncommon for parts of comment piles to resemble dialogue from Idiocracy. This emphasized one of the themes of the movie, the possibility of highly sophisticated tools to be used without sufficient thought or discipline. Taking a page out of my local library's book, pun very much intended, I believe that I will start a propaganda campaign: "Be Kind, THINK!"

This also highlights the lack of respect which I feel is all too common in online discourse. I feel the same way about traditional analog conversation, but I see it to a high extent in digital conversation. Perhaps a part of the problem is that on the Internet we are always simultaneously behind someone's back and right in front of them.

Anyway, the reason it took me twenty minutes to start this post is I completely forgot how to access my account, oh the intricacies of G-Mail. I too fall victim to Idiocracy.

Be Kind, THINK!